This year, we held our third annual meeting with stakeholders and we continue to do more to change the way we report our contribution and impact, including this report and our Audit Transparency Report. These are all aimed at providing greater transparency and understanding of our business.

In FY15 the Board oversaw an election process that resulted in David Sproul being re-elected as Senior Partner and Chief Executive. David began his second term as CEO on 1 June.

2015 also saw the end of my eight years as UK Chairman, and I am delighted to welcome Nick Owen who took up the role on 1 June. Initially a partner in our Audit and Advisory business, Nick then went on to lead the firm’s private sector consulting team. He has over 29 years’ experience, predominantly in the private sector working with energy, media, telecommunications, consumer, industrial and life science businesses.

I am pleased to have been elected as Global Chairman of the Board of DTTL for the next four years. The UK firm has continued to invest in strengthening the Deloitte network of member firms, both financially and through the time committed by people and partners to serve our clients in a truly global way. For example, 40 of our partners are now in global leadership roles, and in FY15 we had more than 250 partners and staff on secondment overseas. Helping to make our global network better is a priority for our firm in the UK as is delivering consistent high quality in all that we do.

When I was elected for the position as UK Chairman in 2006, the world was in a very different place. Business confidence was high, the M&A market was very active and trust in business was at reasonable levels. Since then, we have experienced a global financial crisis, a deep recession and trust in big business has fallen to levels not seen since the 1970s.

We have worked hard with our clients, our people, our regulators and other stakeholders to help rebuild some of that lost trust. For example, we appointed our independent non executives to our main Board (as well as to the Public Interest Oversight Committee) to give views on all aspects of our firm’s activities; we were the first firm to prepare long-form audit reports; and we have worked with our clients, government and others to inform the heated debate on tax and multinational corporations with the aim of improving international tax frameworks.

However, we are mindful that the world has changed post 2007/08, and the bar of expectation for a firm such as ours is being raised all the time. We are ready to jump that bit higher every year and, to that end, please do let us know if there are matters you would like to see covered in this report. We will do our best to feature them in future years.

David Cruickshank,
Chairman Deloitte UK during FY15